The Cellist of Sarajevo

by Steven Galloway

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. — LEON TROTSKY

There is no way to tell which version of a lie is the truth.

To go outside is to accept the possibility you will be killed. On the other hand, Dragan knows, the same can be said of staying inside.

Every day the Sarajevo he thinks he remembers slips away from him a little at a time, like water cupped in the palms of his hands, and when it’s gone he wonders what will be left. He isn’t sure what it will be like to live without remembering how life used to be, what it was like to live in a beautiful city.

“We survived the night,” he said. “That was all we had wished for. When we were given it and it made us happy. Whether we lived for another few hours or fifty more years didn’t matter.”

“How are things?” Ismet grins. “They are as others want them.”

In Kenan’s mind, whatever else happens, the war will not be over until the trams run again.

Everywhere he looks reminds him of some memory, of something lost that can’t be recovered. He wonders what will happen after, when the fighting stops. Even if each building is rebuilt so it’s exactly as it was before, he doesn’t know how he could sit in a comfortable chair and drink a coffee with a friend and not think about this war and all that went with it. But maybe, he thinks, he would like to try. He knows he doesn’t want to give up the possibility.

He suspects that what the world wants most is not to think of it at all.

National Library.

was the most visible manifestation of a society he was proud of. Now the tram tracks serve no purpose and show only what’s been lost.

At the time, Kenan believed the fireman was overcome by the loss of the library, but he now thinks what brought him to his knees was his inability to do anything to save it, or even slow its loss.

When Kenan’s children ask why this war is happening, why people are being starved and shot at, and he can’t answer them, when he sees them suffering and there is nothing he can do about it, he sees the fireman in himself and he wishes someone would pick him up and carry him away. He cannot collapse, though, because his children look to him to reassure them that everything will be fine, that the war will end, that they will all survive. There are times when he doesn’t know how he manages not to evaporate, how his clothes don’t fall to the floor, emptied of what little substance he was filling them with.

His small cry emerging from a bundle of blankets sounded to Dragan like music. Afterward he had an overwhelming feeling of benevolence, not just for his son, but for the world around him, wishing it were everything it wasn’t, wondering what he could do to make things better. But the feeling faded, and then it was gone entirely, like it had never happened.

Dragan still wanted the best for his son, and he still wanted the world to be different, but he never really thought about how he could accomplish this, what possible effect his actions could have. Now he often wonders whether there was anything he did or didn’t do that played some small part in his city’s disintegration. He wonders what would have happened if the men on the hills and the men in the city had in their hearts a tiny fraction of the benevolence felt for and known by a small child.

He knows the sniper will fire again, but he isn’t afraid. At this moment fear doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as bravery. There are no heroes, no villains, no cowards. There’s what he can do, and what he can’t. There’s right and wrong and nothing else. The world is binary. Shading will come later.

Good, he thinks. I will not live in a city where dead bodies lie abandoned in the streets, and you will not tell the world I do.

If this city is to die, it won’t be because of the men on the hills, it will be because of the people in the valley. When they’re content to live with death, to become what the men on the hills want them to be, then Sarajevo will die. Dragan takes Emina’s coat, covers the man at his feet, and gives him back his hat.

He will behave now as he hopes everyone will someday behave. Because civilization isn’t a thing that you build and then there it is, you have it forever. It needs to be built constantly, re-created daily. It vanishes far more quickly than he ever would have thought possible. And if he wishes to live, he must do what he can to prevent the world he wants to live in from fading away. As long as there’s war, life is a preventative measure.

“Good afternoon,” Dragan says, his voice bright. The man looks up. He seems surprised. “Good afternoon,” Dragan repeats. The man nods, smiles, and wishes him the same.

The music demanded that she remember this, that she know to a certainty that the world still held the capacity for goodness. The notes were proof of that.

The cellist wouldn’t be back tomorrow. There would be no more concerts in the street. She was disappointed it was over. Arrow leaned down and placed her rifle beside the cellist’s bow.

“My name is Alisa.”

Siege of Sarajevo.

At four o’clock in the afternoon on May 27, 1992, during the Siege of Sarajevo, several mortar shells struck a group of people waiting to buy bread behind the market on Vase Miskina. Twenty-two people were killed and at least seventy were wounded. For the next twenty-two days Vedran Smailović, a renowned local cellist, played Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor at the site in honor of the dead. His actions inspired this novel, but I have not based the character of the cellist on the real Smailović, who was able to leave Sarajevo in December of 1993 and now lives in Northern Ireland.

April 5, 1992, to February 29, 1996.

As of October 2007 the leaders of the Bosnian Serb Army, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, are still at large, despite having been charged in 1996 with war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslovia in The Hague.